Agfa Helps One of the Largest Chinese Newspapers Become First All-digital

Friday, November 21, 2003

Press release from the issuing company

Ridgefield Park, NJ – November 20, 2003 – The Taiwan-based United Daily Newspaper Group (UDN) has ordered 12 :Polaris XT systems from Agfa, bringing the total number of :Polaris systems recently purchased by UDN to 20. The purchase, which makes UDN the first all-digital newspaper publisher in Taiwan, came following rigorous pilot testing of the system and the successful implementation of another seven :Polaris units earlier this year.
The purchase also includes Agfa’s workflow systems, :Plateroom Manager (PRM) and Output Manager (OMAN). The 20 :Polaris XT systems and workflow will be installed at four printing sites in Taiwan to fully replace UDN’s current CtF workflow.
“Agfa, as our long-term partner, has once again demonstrated professional expertise on custom system solutions, leading-edge technology and quality service,” said Mac Chen, general manager of print affairs division, UDN Group.
Since the early 1990’s, the UDN Group has turned to Agfa for imagesetters of varying formats and the workflow solutions to manage them. With five Newspaper titles published daily in Taiwan, the UDN Group needs to produce more than 5,000 pieces of printing plates everyday. Agfa’s CtP solutions were what UDN needed to be able to produce the number of plates they need and provide the quality their readers and advertisers expect.
“With such huge and complex data containing editorial text and graphics as well as advertising material from various sources and formats, Agfa offers us a steady and efficient workflow to manage them. In particular, Agfa helps us to successfully integrate our press room, existing workflow, and CtP solution through Agfa’s custom solutions to fulfill our unique requirement,” Chen added.
“We are pleased the UDN Group, in the company’s migration to CtP, chose to partner with Agfa. Clearly, UDN is poised to lead Taiwan’s Newspaper industry into the CtP era,” said Agfa’s Andrew Wong, general manager for the greater China region. “We believe that UDN will become the best demonstration site in Asia, and Agfa is committed to providing the latest technology and highest level of quality service to grow with UDN.”
Agfa’s Industry-Leading Newspaper Solutions.
The :Polaris XT is a single-wide, high-speed flatbed platesetter with an FD-yag laser. It uses a convenient plate trolley to keep more than 1,000 single or 500 panoramic plates online. Output Manager, an automated workflow management tool, provides custom, job-based processing and offers user-definable queues, allowing output to be organised and automatically scheduled. Plateroom Manager manages and tracks pages from the front-end through to the press. It tracks output between multiple sites, manages output to multiple platesetters and multiple presses and allows for on-the-fly changes to be made during production.